Shaun Robinson

If You Discover a Fire Shaun Robinson

Poetry. Precision-built poems that attempt CPR on their own irregular metre, on their own unreliable meaning. Vancouver poet Shaun Robinson's IF YOU DISCOVER A FIRE is a debut collection of poems that make a virtue of their failure to communicate. They forage through the syntax and vocabulary of late-night voicemails, letters to the editor, songs invented in the shower, professional jargon, Witness Wanted signs, technical manuals, and text-message typos to assemble verbal collages that raise more questions than they answer. In settings ranging from Montreal's Mile End to a commercial flight above the Midwest to a wildfire in the mountains of British Columbia, these are poems rooted in workingclass Canadian experience, poems that flirt with both safety and danger, that drone on like drunken strangers in a bar. Gathering reference from weather reports, football announcers, aerial disappearances, and the movie Groundhog Day, these poems sound their forlorn yawp through the alleys of East Vancouver.